Misspelled

When I was in second grade, we used to have weekly spelling tests. My mother was good at spelling, and she used to go over the word list with me. I had no confidence and was always afraid I would fail the test, though I always got all the words right until--------the hard words. We all walked to school then, and I can remember as if it were yesterday that walk to school repeating over and over the two hardest words I'd ever been challenged to spell. The words were "store" and "white." Mrs. Flynn would dictate the words and then come to our desks, one by one, to correct our papers armed with THE RED PENCIL. I used to quake, she seemed about 9 feet tall, and severe. My feeling then was that if I missed a word, I would fail the test and almost certainly the entire grade, thereby disgracing my family and being doomed to repeat the second grade. At the time I couldn't think of anything worse: reading class itself would have been a horror. I could read well, but back then there was one pace for the whole class, and we all had to sit and wait for the slowest of the non-readers to struggle through the page. It was agonizing, and woe to anybody who tried to read ahead. Mrs. Flynn used to abruptly stop the slow reader to pounce on anyone she suspected of going ahead in the story. If you had "lost your place," you were in trouble. So I did not want to repeat the grade: I did not want to fail the spelling test over those 2 words. I tried my best and waited for The Correction. Here she came, red weapon in hand, from behind my seat. It seems she always appeared, stealthily, from behind. Down the list of words, sometimes her pencil would leave a little red dot on the page as she checked the word, but not the dreaded check mark. She glided past "store," Whew, got that one right, but her pencil stopped at my feeble attempt at "white." I knew I'd missed it, and thought the worst possible scenario would be that red check. But no, instead she demanded, out loud, so the whole class could hear, "What's this supposed to be?" I mumbled the word, she gave it a big red checkmark, and the world didn't end. It had only stopped for a part of eternity.